Saturday, April 29, 2017

The woman remained seated and was now looking at him, in her turn, without curiosity. The agent crossed the room quickly to retrieve the hat from a distant divan. Suddenly, then, Marcello understood why the sight of the woman had inspired that painful sense of regret in him: actually, he realized, he didn’t want her to do the agent’s bidding, and seeing her submit to his embrace had made Marcello suffer as if confronted with an intolerable profanity. Surely she knew nothing about the light radiating from her forehead, which did not belong to her anyway, as beauty does not generally belong to the beautiful.

It was an indifference that denoted not only familiarity, but careless familiarity. In truth she had no name for normality, since she was in it up to her eyes, the way we believe that animals, if they talked, would give no name to nature, being an integral and undivided part of it. But he remained outside, and for him normality was called normality precisely because he was excluded from it and because he felt it to be in such contrast to his own abnormality. To be like Giulia, you had to be born that way, or.…

The door behind him opened and he turned around. Giulia stood before him in a wedding dress of white silk, holding the full veil falling from her head in both hands so that he could admire it.